


Peter Nureyev and the Darkened Door

by underwater_owl



Series: aktinovolia et al [4]
Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Detective Story, Horror, M/M, departing a bit more from canon in this one, murder investigation, the sequel is where it gets weird, they did technically name the city HYPERION, vaguely lovecraftian elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-07
Updated: 2018-11-06
Packaged: 2019-07-08 02:24:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 14,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15920970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/underwater_owl/pseuds/underwater_owl
Summary: Peter Nureyev was an absolute nightmare of a client, and Juno is extremely relieved that that phase of their lives is behind them.  Of course, he turns out to be an even crummier assistant.Juno and Peter leave Hyperion to investigate a murder.





	1. The Corpse

**Author's Note:**

> This fic contains themes and imagery that are towards the grimmer end of the spectrum. The podcast isn't exactly lighthearted all the time to begin with, but unlike the previous story this one goes down into the grimier end of the pool and splashes around there pretty gleefully. If you're not good with blood it might not be the story for you.

The body had originally laid on its’ back in the centre of a twelve-pointed star, underneath an archway made out of rough hewn obsidian, run through with filigree wiring in gold and silver. The star is painted on the floor, probably just by wetting powdered versions of the same metal. Juno can see the smears where the corpse was lifted up and away for transfer to the morgue.

“Huh.” Juno says, looking up from the intricate detail on the floorboards to the door that cuts across it. It’s suspended between two black pillars. A grandiose gateway between nothing, into nothing, freestanding from all other architecture in the room. The door in the freestanding frame is thick wood. It hangs ajar.

The victim (no longer in the room, off in some extremely fancy morgue somewhere by now) is a sturdy woman, with large brown eyes, white hair, and horn-rimmed glasses. She’d been a heartbreaker, smart as a whip and twice as mean. She’d had a habit of fluttering her hands up to brush her hair behind her ears, smiling apologetically, and then saying something scathing. Honest, mind you, always honest, but seldom kind.

Not that Juno gets this from the scene. Galatea DeCade has been packed off to the Utopia Proxima morgue long before Juno arrived. She’d been a client, though before she moved out of Hyperion City. She hadn’t been good, she hadn’t been kind, she hadn’t been particularly moral- and she hadn’t deserved this, not one bit.

He hopes she went quick, and it wasn’t too bad. Given the amount of blood staining that star, though, he kind of doubts it.

To think, the morning had started off so well. 

\---

Juno measures his relationship with Peter Nureyev in facts and firsts. _This morning was the first morning that they woke up together after Peter’s return from his first trip away, since they were dating._ See alternately, the entry for _this is the day when Juno learns that Peter likes the Sunday crossword._

They drink their coffee in bed, sunlight pooling over them. Juno holds the pen, reads the clues out loud when he doesn’t know them. Peter is the kind of smart and impatient where Juno can barely finish the hint before he races in with the answer. _Palindrome. Retrograde. Atticus Finch._ Breakfast is french toast (courtesy of Peter) with peanut butter (courtesy of Juno.) When they’re done eating they abandon the plates in the sink and make out with hedonistic decadence and absolutely no plans to do anything other than fall back into bed.

It reminds Juno of the things he’d been looking forward to after the wedding. Of the literal honeymoon period, that window of time where everything still seemed all whirlwind and rosy. He tries not to think about that, tries not to remember that the higher you get on the feeling, the longer the drop and the messier the hit into rock bottom.

The main difference this time is that Peter Nureyev has recently developed an apparent sixth sense for when Juno is threatening to enter an anxiety spiral. He plucks the pencil, and the newspaper with the crossword out of Juno’s hands, and lets them fall off the edge of the bed. The pages of the paper flutter downwards, landing with the detritus of their combined clothing, the rest of the mess from last night.

 

This is the day he learns that Peter Nureyev is a little bit _untidy,_ in his heart of hearts. Which is fine, Juno is too.

“There’s nothing in the world but this, right here, Juno,” says Peter, moving to nudge Juno onto his side, so he can spoon up against his back, and tuck a protective arm around his middle, “we’re alone, afloat on a vast sea, just us in this bed. Any problems we think of, we shove off the side and they sink away into the depths, not to surface again.”

He can almost envision it. Juno’s never seen a body of water bigger than a swimming pool, but Peter sent him back a postcard from Whittenham of a lapping opalescent sea. He isn’t sure how good beds are for floating, but he could picture the two of them out in the middle of it.

“We’re going to die of dehydration in less than four hours under this sun,” is his first thought, which only makes Peter laugh and reaches for him, hand skimming an eager promise along Juno’s arm. All right, maybe everything is going to be fine, just this once. In their imaginary ocean voyage.

Naturally, Juno’s communicator chooses that exact moment to chime. 

Peter, Juno will remember later, moans a complaint and tries to hold onto him by the hips, to stop him answering it. This would have been absolutely the right move, except it is a Wednesday, and he’d promised Rita that if there were an emergency in the office, she should call.

“Steel.” He says, half in the bed, one palm braced on the floor, device held up to his ear.

“Detective Juno Steel?” Asks a woman down the phone line, _not Rita,_ so Juno starts to try to disengage.

“Sorry, you’ve caught me at a, uh, incredibly inopportune moment, I’m gonna have to…” to trail off while one of Peter’s hands slides up the inside of his thigh. Juno can’t fend him off, or he’ll either drop the phone or fall face first into the carpet. He tries to hop himself back over onto the mattress without losing the call, which isn’t easy when his boyfriend’s fingertips are right-

“Don’t hang up the phone, Detective Steel. This is about a homicide.”

Peter, eavesdropper that he is, stills. He withdraws his touch and helps Juno roll fully back onto the mattress.

“I’m listening,” says Juno, flat on his back and a little out of breath, while Peter gets up on his knees beside him and puts a hand on Juno’s sternum, bracing himself lightly up as he leans over and past him to retrieve his glasses off the bedside table. Juno oofs, ever so slightly, though Peter doesn’t really press hard.

“Thank you. This is Detective Kammourieh, from the Utopia Proxima Police Department. You’re acquainted with Miss Galatea DeCade?”

“Oh, for. Whoever got murdered, DeCade didn’t do it. She’s been threatening every husband, wife, research assistant, Dick and Mary she’s had in the fifteen years I’ve known her. Been on trial twice, not-guilty both times- and not just Martian ‘I can afford to be found not be guilty.’ DeCade is a bone fide terrifying curmudgeon, but definitely all bark and no bite.”

Peter has his glasses on now, and obviously gets it before Juno does. He stays sitting very, very still, hand still splayed over Juno’s heart. The voice on the other end of the line hesitates, and Juno’s stomach drops.

“When’d it happen?”

“Last night. The maid found the body this morning.”

“Shame. But I haven’t worked for DeCade for nearly six years now. I don’t know how much good I can be to you.”

“All the same, detective, if it’s not too much trouble we’d like you to come on over here. We have a few questions for you, and some of this is the kind of thing that’s best done in person.” Juno hesitates. The sea the bed is floating on seems to be getting awfully choppy. The voice on the phone takes on a vaguely soothing bent. “Now, I’m just asking, friendly like, I know you worked her case during that second prosecution and you were instrumental in getting those charges dropped, but you don’t work for the HCPD anymore and we have no real right to requisition you down here. No budget to pay your time, either.”

“I’ll…” says Juno, and bites off his instinctual rejection when Peter’s hand presses, and he head three times up and down, a slow and deliberate _yes you will_ , “…think about it and get back to you. Gotta check the schedule.”

“Appreciate it, Mister Steel.”

The call ends, and Juno lets the communicator fall away from his ear.

“You know, for someone spent last night _insisting_ I deserved a few days off work, you sure do look like someone who’s asking me to get involved in the investigation into the murder of a woman with more enemies than the two of us combined.”

“I’ll highlight the new variable for you, Mister Steel. I’m sure you’ll see, it makes the change in the equation very simple.” Says Peter, and then swings his knee across to straddle Juno, a move that is a _blatant_ cheat, looming over him with an imperious little smile. “Utopia. Proxima.”

It honestly takes about two seconds more of convincing before Juno knows he’s going to give Peter everything he wants. About twenty minutes after that, he calls Detective Kammourieh back.

Peter is already packing a bag for them both, while Juno sits at the kitchen table with the dregs of the coffee and jots down the address. The woman won’t go into preliminaries over the phone, but she does give them the address they’ll be driving to. Peter flips Juno a wallet with a fake ID in it, and Juno reads off his own details as well as name, birthday, and ID numbers for his new assistant ‘Zachary Czar.’

He collapses into the couch with a sigh and lies his head all the way back. They’ve got a few minutes before their paperwork clears and they’re sent their passes to enter the Utopia habitat dome.

Galatea DeCade, dead at last. Two times dodging wrongful convictions for homicide, six times receiving credible death throats, and two times avoiding outright assassination- and those were just the cases she hired Juno on. He’d cut his teeth as a PI investigating her cases, and he’d learned a hell of a lot taking direction from her. He has no doubt she could have handled any one of those disgruntled exes, be they colleagues, competitors and lovers, or any combination of the above. Instead she’d remembered the name of the cop who’d decided to talk the DA into dropping the charges. She’d offered him a job.

It probably wasn’t altruism so much as not wanting to be bothered leaving the lab. He remembers being young, following her barked instructions via communicator, making every rookie mistake possible along the way and having her there to point them out, all on speakerphone while cleared rust and grime out of some kind of ancient alien technology with a cotton bud and a dental pick.

Peter settles onto the carpet at the foot of the couch, and pools his elbows into Juno’s lap, resting his cheek against his thigh and settling down. That doesn’t necessarily make Galatea’s murder any less real, but…

Well. A little Peter Nureyev never hurts.

“I booked us a hotel.” Says Peter, and Juno cracks an eyelid, glancing down at the pad Peter has to show him. It’s a glossy scroll of photos taken for the benefits of tourists, crisp sheets pictured under intimate lightly. A balcony view of the lake at the centre of the dome, of course right at sunset.

“You know, we don’t really have the best luck with hotels,” says Juno, grumpily, but he winds his hand through Peter’s hair.

“This one has five stars online. And I picked up a very fancy surveillance jamming device while I was on Bimbilla.”

“So have you really never been to Utopia Proxima before?”

“Once.” Says Peter, eyes shutting, relaxing a little more into Juno’s touch. “Once, on a three _hour_ pass. I swore I’d find a way back, Juno, and now here it is. Fated to be.”

His slight lift in mood deflates again, but he keeps his breath steady and sighs.

“I don’t think Galatea would see it that way.”

Peter sobers, and opens his eyes back up and looking up into Juno’s eyes.

“I didn’t know you knew her.”

“A long time ago now. When she moved to Utopia it just wasn’t practical. For one thing, there really is never any crime there. For another, the population controls and visiting days allowed per capita are so tightly rationed that I’d never be able to accomplish a thing. You know that Kammourieh is going to get us twelve hours at most, we probably won’t even get to enjoy this fancy hotel of yours.”

“Oh, no, Juno. I think she’ll do a little better than that for you. In fact, once we get there, I have every faith that Detective Kammourieh is going to find you absolutely indispensable.”

Juno snorts, and looks up when his communicator chimes.

His jaw drops, a little, and Peter grabs him by the knees, climbing up Juno’s body, landing sort of strewn in his laugh to lean in and read what he’s looking at.

Seventy two hours. _Each._ Three days in Utopia Proxima.

“That’s impossible,” says Juno.

“I’m extending the reservation,” says Peter, gleefully, and glides off him in a flash, presumably to go add more to their valise.

So it is that they hit the road.


	2. The Glove

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Juno and Peter inspect the crime scene.

Just like everything else about the place, the drive into Utopia Proxima is picturesque and perfect. The covered roadway cuts down a craggy Martian mountainside, giving travelers a spectacular view of the jewel-like structure in that vast sea of red. The forests inside are emerald, the lake at the centre of the ring is crystal blue.

Even Juno’s coal black heart gives a little rasp that could be an attempt at a beat as they drive up to the gates.

Designed as the most luxurious retreat Mars has to offer, Utopia Proxima controls entrance into the dome more tightly than any other colony anywhere on any world. Visitors passes are auctioned off at a limited rate and sell for astronomical prices. Habitation is fixed; the original creators may deed their spots to a relative, but only one. Juno’s heard of divorce cases where one spouse inherits a parent’s spot in Utopia.

Break ins don’t happen. In a somewhat radical departure from the expected, riches are not encouraged in Utopia. People live off of their citizen accounts and leave all loot behind them in Hyperion, so that nothing is ever so rich a target that it makes the security systems are worth trying your legs at.

Or, so Peter explains on the drive there, anyways.

“Thus, I never bothered. It’s very rare to find a place in the universe that I thought I’d never see, Juno, but this is certainly one of them.”

“Meaning you’re not coming along with me to rob all these rich so and so’s blind while I’m off digging up answers?”

“Certainly not. For one thing, I intend to keep you company on your investigation. For another, when you inevitably send me off for propriety’s sake, I intend to see absolutely everything. It’s a beautiful city, Juno. _The_ beautiful city.”

Peter is certainly serious about beauty, Juno knows.

They park the car at the entrance and set out by foot to their hotel. Nothing in Utopia is more than a fifteen minute walk away from anything else, so street traffic isn’t tolerated. Paths shaded by lush canopies connect the stately homes, the boutiques and restaurants. Their hotel is easy to find, and the automated service at the desk accepts their details and even checks their bag for them.

By necessity, Utopia is at the cutting edge of android and robot tech, automating service positions of all kind rather than tolerating baristas and cleaners and gardeners in among the citizens and their cherished guest.

It all feels a little haunted to Juno. Beautiful, sure- you couldn’t ask for more picturesque trails, like something out of one of Rita’s hollows. Peter, damn him, has a _camera_ with him, hanging on a strap about his neck. He keeps hanging back, trying to get photos of Juno walking away through dangling fronds.

“You know we’re late for a crime scene, don’t you?”

“I’ll catch up,” Peter calls, and then does, with a few springing steps on his damnably long legs. “You shouldn’t be so cranky, Juno. Look around you. Just draw in a breath, taste how clean the air is. We’re in a real biodome.”

It’s hard to maintain a curmudgeonly attitude in the face of all that wonderment. He bites down on a smile, and then huffs out an exasperated sound when Peter immediately snatches a photo of it. But, all right, maybe just once, he can breathe.

He draws air in deep, down into the bottom of his lungs, and tastes a dozen different things. Green, like a bouquet of fresh cut flowers, and soil, like he has a nose in close to a houseplant, and the damp of water that he associates with being near a pool except without the bitterness of chlorine somehow. Not a hint of sewage or garbage or car exhaust. The air tastes like… life.

Also, he immediately starts to sneeze.

“Juno?”

Asks Peter, brushing aside a vine that trails down over the walkway up to Galatea’s estate.

“Juno, is everything all right?”

“Bdo. I’b beed poithoned.”

“Of course. This is probably your first time being exposed to this amount of pollen. You’re having an allergic reaction. Here…”

Procuring a small tin from a pocket, Peter offers him a little pill- and then a handkerchief, for Juno to dab at his streaming eyes while the medication tries to kick in.

“If this is what trees are, I hate them,” says Juno, when he can breathe again, and Peter laughs and rubs a conciliatory circle between his shoulder blades.

“First time in Utopia, detective?” Asks a voice behind them. Khadijah Kammourieh is a striking woman, tall and thin, with bright black eyes. 

She looks a little like Peter, except with a longer face and a blaster holstered at her hip that actually doesn’t look particularly glad to see them. Juno had a mental image of the Utopia Proxima police as softened by years in a cushy posting, but Kammourieh dispels that illusion without even needing to try. Her stance and her scars scream _veteran._

People here have the best protection money can buy, Juno supposes, then frowns when he remembers that it wasn’t enough to save Galatea.

“They said this place was enough to make a lady cry. I just didn’t know they meant medically.”

Kammourieh lifts an eyebrow, then begins to lead them up towards the steps.

“Juno,” says Peter, quietly, when Kammourieh is a little off ahead, just out of earshot, “do you remember the conversation we had about my notifying you in advance of any background intrigues before we launched headfirst into a sticky situation?”

“Nureyev,” grits Juno, through his teeth, because perfect, just _perfect._

“I’m afraid the window on that one rather slid by. But I want you to know I did remember, albeit belatedly, and I really am very contrite.”

“Care to elaborate before we walk through those doors, Zachary?”

“It’s a bit too long of a story to get into right now.” Peter doesn’t sound particularly contrite to Juno. In fact, he sounds infuriatingly calm. “For now maybe you can tap into the warm glow of nostalgia?”

Juno honest to God growls, and Peter tries instead;

“Or trust I’ll make it up to you later?”

Kammourieh is holding the door for them. Juno permits himself to be ushered firmly inside, growling under his breath the whole way.

\----

“Six years,” echoes Kammourieh, noting down her conversation with Juno in a little book, “that’s when she moved into Proxima.”

“Yep. And that’s why we lost touch. I liked DeCade, but I wasn’t exactly her…”

“Type?”

“Friend,” corrects Juno, and gives the police detective a dry look, “but that, either.”

“She did have a thing for pretty ladies with smart mouths,” defends Kammourieh, and Juno nods, echoing her, emphasizing the part in that sentence that matters.

“Emphasis, pretty,” interjects Juno.

Over at the wall, Peter makes an utterly indignant sound simultaneously at Juno and somehow on his behalf, without looking up from the device he’s bent over.

“I said don’t touch that,” says Kammourieh, for about the third time, and he straightens back up, hands held out peaceably.

“So here’s a question,” says Juno, before the two of them can lock horns, not for the first time, about interfering with a crime scene, “what’s she doing with all this stuff? I thought there were supposed to be rules about the value of items that could be brought into Utopia.”

“A lot of it is value _less._ ” Says Peter, surprising Juno as well as Kammourieh, by the look on her face. “This is a machine she could easily have built herself out of scrap. That artefact’s from an unfashionably recent era, and an extremely common example, not in very good condition at that. This, she probably bought on the black market- or maybe even bought it cleanly and then paid to have paperwork forged to hide its’ value. She’d ruin its’ marketability in the future, but to a researcher, what does that matter?”

“Subject matter expert,” Juno explains to Kammourieh, who’s now watching Peter just a little more hawkishly than before, “it’s why I brought him along.”

“Czar is right. And I can tell you, we’ve been cataloguing a lot of the stuff in this room. I heard they found a bunch of gold buried in the earth of the shrubs in a landscaping truck the other week. But stuff gets through.”

“Sounds like her. She wasn’t a woman who let a little thing like the law get in the way of doing something she wanted. Who found her?”

“The caregiver. When Emily came down in the morning she found her employer lying on the floor in a puddle of blood.”

“And I assume Emily is a suspect?” Wonders Juno, and touches the edge of the heavy wooden door, the one supported by the striking obsidian arch. He pushes the thing lightly, and it moves easily. It’s weighty, but perfectly balanced, which means it probably didn’t swing open alone.

“No. Because Emily isn’t human.” Says Kammourieh, and sighs at the look on Juno’s face. “You know how tight population controls are, here. Emily is robot, a highly advanced cybernetic model rated for household chores and standard caregiving. She has a very basic AI system, but was definitely deactivated at the time of death. We have footage of her in her recharging cradle.”

“Huh.” Juno steps back from the door, returning it to the angle where he found it. Robots are far from common, and AIs even less so, but when you have the kind of money Galatea DeCade could through again, Juno guesses you get the best of the best. “Well, was Emily the last one to see her alive?”

“No. That would be her research assistant. Honor Eyra kpe. Emily said they were working late with Galatea that night, but then didn’t see them in the house when she came down in the morning. Honor hasn’t been responding to our attempts to contact them, and as of this morning, will have overstayed their visitor’s pass.”

Juno swallows. That’s not the kind of crime you’d commit lightly. It probably means Eyra kpe is one of two things: either they’re the murderer; or Kammourieh is looking for another victim.

And then Kammourieh says something that makes Juno’s stomach sink, because there’s zero chance it means good news.

“Where did your assistant go?”

\---

Peter Nureyev is not going to break his promise to Juno. He won’t steal _anything._

It’s been such a delicately short time since they got this third chance with one another. They spent two nights in Juno’s apartment after Edward’s death, and those involved mostly clinging to one another in intimate shock. He’d stretched the little soap bubble of perfection as long as humanly possible, before fleeing into the stars.

Peter had taken a job on Whittenham doing an old friend a favour, and throwing himself into a job, taking the time to lick his Edward-related wounds. Then he’d come back, come back to a warm and willing and receptive Juno Steel, a soft landing in a place he might learn to call home.

Cast in the role of protector, Juno seems to have taken to the new shape of their relationship like a duck to water. He’s still riding high on protecting Peter from a dead man on a hotel room floor. This suits Peter fine. Anything that keeps Juno happy.

But if he’s here (probably only partially) on the basis of his being the damsel in the story, that means he really needs to stay on good behavior until Juno knows he can be counted on.

 _No stealing._ And much more importantly, Peter; keep your promises. There’s a big difference between exasperating Juno and being a source of anguish and instability in his life. Peter never wants to come down on the wrong side of that equation ever again. No stealing.

But never was anything said about photographing every single piece of anomaly-research there is in this house.

He gives the two detectives the slip while they’re diligently determining their list of suspects and slips into a room that looks like a it might be a research lab. He smiles in satisfaction as the door hisses open and a blast of climate-controlled air hits him. Peter raises his camera up, checks to be sure it’s on and in focus, and steps inside.

The storage room is every bit the treasure trove he’d imagined it would be. Gallatea has been a competitive collector for decades, and one of very few people in Aktinovolic research.

The first item on the shelf is a tablet, hand carved, Venutian, probably. He snaps a photo, checks the screen to make sure the engravings have come through clearly, adjusts the contrast and tries again. As much as he likes scandalizing Juno with tourist snaps of him, there’s a much deeper purpose to carrying this around.

Next is an instrument that looks vaguely like the cousin of some kind of calliope. He doesn’t recognize it on sight but decides he can search the reference texts for it later. So, Peter takes another careful few shots, and pads softly along the thick carpet. The rug is an antique, possibly even of old Earth import, and his feet sink into it deeply as he circles the room.

He’s at the end of the second shelf when he comes to the glove.

Peter recognizes it right away. The design is diagramed out on the seventy second page of the Aktonovolic Atlas- or rather, on his scanned copy of that page. The recreation of the book has been his constant companion for the last few weeks. Peter hisses in a breath between his teeth, and curses just how much he _loves_ Juno. It would be the perfect opportunity to whisk this thing out of here before anyone was the wiser. This glove is stolen property, and definitely well over the allowed price range of an item imported into Utopia Proxima.

He’ll have to bribe whoever’s conducting the estate sale to let him get choice pick of this room before it’s all cataloged and auctioned off. Not because he believes he can be outbid, necessarily, but just to be sure he does swoop in and poach the choice morsels before anyone else can get the idea to do the same.

Peter reaches for the camera, then thinks better of it. He glances over his shoulder at the door but can’t hear Juno or Kammourieh behind him.

Just a touch can’t possibly hurt, can it?

Letting the camera hang around his neck again, Peter shacks his right hand, once, as though limbering it up. He reaches forward and slips his fingers into the glove. When nothing happens, he feels himself grow a little bolder, and pushes his whole hand inside.

One, two, four, two, five, he twitches his fingertips in the sequence detailed in jewel type on the page of the book it’s printed on, the old superstitious call sign to open one of the doors, in all those colonists’ stories.

Without fanfare or warning, the glove is suddenly empty. 

The room is silent, except for the single sound the camera makes as it falls out of the air, strap suddenly supported by nothing at all. It bounces on the carpet, just once, and then there’s a long few minutes of silence. 

At least power-saving mode automatically turning the device off with a disconsolate whir.


	3. The Orchid

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Peter begins exploring his alternate world. 
> 
> Juno resents his abandonment very much, thank you.

“I’m sorry, did you just say _he’ll turn up?_ About your assistant? Lost in _my_ crime scene?”

“It’s much, much more likely he went down to swim in the lake and can’t hear his communicator from the shore,” promises Juno, hotly, deeply annoyed by the fact that this is true, “I promise. We work together sometimes, but he doesn’t feel remotely ‘beholden to my authority,’ or anything.”

Kammourieh reads the look on his face and allows Juno to push back past her into the study where the body was found.

“So you boys over at the HCPD like to mix a little business and pleasure, huh?”

“I wouldn’t know. I haven’t been HCPD in years.” Juno scans the room quickly, and pauses, heading over towards one wall, and bending down, then crouching.

“I think you’ve got something down here.”

“What?” Asks Kammourieh, not asking what, but more how it’s possible that a Hyperion City private eye found something her crime scene people missed.

“No one Galatea’s age likes getting down and picking stuff up from behind the furniture. Hell, I’m not even forty, and if I want a fun high all I’ve got to do is stand up a little too fast right now. What gets dropped stays dropped.”

“You might have a point, Steel.” Says Kammourieh, brushing him aside, and reaching under the dresser with a gloved hand to draw out a small device. “It’s…”

Juno interrupts her with a hiss, then puts his fingertip over his mouth, indicating silence. He reaches into his pocket, and pulls out a pen, and then uses the tip of it to press one button, two buttons, three, before explaining quietly;

“It’s a tape recorder. Voice activated. Galatea keeps- kept these models on the counter whenever she was working on a project. It’s probably got about a twelve hour capacity on it, and as it fills up it wipes anything at the back of the tape. So what you’re looking at here, is potentially a whole bunch of hours of crime scene investigation and chatter, and then if you’re lucky and you boys and girls were efficient…”

“Audio recording of what happened last night.” Breathes Kammourieh, and sits back on her haunches. “I take it back about you, Steel.”

“Take what back?”

“You’re not the _most obvious_ suspect.”

Juno feels his mouth drop open. _Suspect?_ So much for the compliment of being brought in for a professional consultation. The three days are as long as she thought she’d need to interrogate him.

“Your expert detecting skills tell you that when I voluntarily provided you with audio of the murder taking place?!”

“ _Potential_ audio of the murder taking place,” says Kammourieh, “provided we parkrangers over here were nice and efficient.”

So the UPPD know about their big city nickname, huh? He shuts up, while she cues back through the files, to about the right place in the footage, searching for the last timestamp from yesterday night.

“We’ve got something. Two recordings, one near midnight, and another at about two in the morning.”

Juno doesn’t need to tell her to press play, she’s already turning on the tape, oldest first.

 _“Another dead end,”_ says a voice, not Galatea’s, Juno guesses Eyra kpe, _“I don’t know what we’re doing wrong. I’m sure we’ve programmed the alignment just right, but we cannot maintain the connection._ ”

_“What we need is a doorstop.”_

There’s Galatea, sounding dryly amused. 

_“All right then. The combination written on page seventy six is … pinky, ring, index, ring, thumb-“_

_“Got it. I’m-“_

And then the audio crackles, badly, like whatever Galatea is trying has generated bad interference. The rest of the clip is like that. Frowning, Kammourieh clicks next.

“ _No!”_ Shouts a voice, not easy to tell whose, but he thinks Galatea’s, _“I said no!”_

There’s another burst of that static again, and then Honor’s voice in the background, rendered indistinct by the crackle of the corrupted recording. Then, there’s a crash, and another, deep and booming. Juno thinks it could be the recorder dropping to the floor, or maybe an earthquake. Or a truck being smashed through a wall.

Galatea shouts one last word that Juno can’t catch, and then the recording ends.

Playing automatically, there comes the sound of a door opening, the creak of footsteps, then the crash of something dropping, maybe a tray, and a woman- presumably the caregiver this time, screams with the shock of a grizzly discovery. That’s some pretty humanized AI software, if that’s how it processes shock.

Kammourieh’s eyes narrow in suspicion, and Juno can guess just what she’s thinking. It’s less of a noble deed if the recording he turns over to the police has already been doctored to remove any sound of his voice.

“We’re going down to the station, where the sound techs are going to do their very best to clean this up. Where I’m going to double and triple check entry footage into the city to make sure you really arrived in Proxima for the very first time this morning. Above all where you’re going to sit in an interrogation cell and wait while _I_ prescreen these tapes until I know for sure this isn’t a deal gone wrong. Then we’re going to find your little friend before he causes any trouble in my city.”

Probably too late, thinks Juno, with considerable chagrin, but for once he keeps his mouth shut.

\---

Now, technically, the trouble Peter is in isn’t in Detective Kammourieh’s city, and it isn’t so much that he’s causing it as that he’s beset by it. If he were talking to Juno, he would quibble on these points, and Juno would have a snippy remark for him in return, and that would be just as it should be.

As it is, he’s alone here, wherever here is. It’s his turn to sneeze, not from pollen, but from the dust, kicking up thick under his footsteps when he staggers forward out of thin air, into the tremendous hall. Peter adjusts his glasses, pulls the flashlight out of his back pocket, and turns it on to take in the view.

For a few seconds, he thinks it can’t possibly be real.

Aktivolonic research, from the Greek word for radiation, is the study of the peculiar distortions that are scattered across the galaxy. Moratuwa is one he’s discussed with Juno, but there are a half dozen more that are widely none, and three dozen more carefully hidden and only illuminated in the pages of the atlas.

The original researchers approached the anomalies as a natural phenomenon. Then, as different planets discovered evidence of alien life, most famously on Mars, researchers began examining the possibility that the anomalies were a part of a broader… structure? Pattern?

He would have been prepared to believe a lot. Might even have made a private prediction or two. He isn’t a naturally cautious man, not by any stretch of the imagination. Peter had been imagining the implications of understanding what the link between the scars in time and space _were._ He wouldn’t have predicted that they’d find concrete proof of the alien origin of the system in his lifetime, or even necessarily understand what the network was for.

Never would he have imagined that the secret was so intact a door could still be opened. That all of this was right under their noses.

A year working with Miasma had been enough to convince him that the ancient Martians weren’t aware of the Aktivolonic anomalies. Unsurprising, since they weren’t a people predisposed to exploration, and evidence of the- he doesn’t know what to call it, now, the network? The doorways? The subreality? Well, none of this tends to turn up on the red planet, except as imported by humankind.

The space around him looks nothing Martian architecture, anyways. The floor is tiled, which suggests that he’s indoors, but when he sweeps the beam of his light outwards it just goes on, and on, and on. Peter wonders if he’s in a courtyard, because he can’t see anything like a support pillar in any direction, but when he turns the flashlight upwards there’s a ceiling there.

The ceiling is vaulted, a dizzying pattern of connected domes and sweeps. Peter has a vague sense of breathtaking intricacy. He’s in a room, a room built at a scale he can barely comprehend. The implications are stunning.

“Juno, if you could see this now…”

He speaks, mostly to hear the sound of his own voice, which comes back to his own ears strangely. Instead of echoing, it’s muffled and thick, like he’s speaking into a small box underwater, not into a hall so cavernous it defies belief. Maybe the laws of physics here are so thoroughly broken that noise itself doesn’t behave the way it should.

Peter turns his flashlight back around behind him and sees something encouraging that he hadn’t noticed at first glance. Dustmotes hang in the air, caught floating between him and the vague outline, but this time a faint glimmer catches his attention.

It’s an archway, made out of familiar obsidian. He’d nearly missed it, the black structure against a black backdrop. Peter walks that way, clocking approximate distance. It’s about the same distance as the store room with the glove to the research lab with the archway…

Where the corpse was found, he reminds himself, and feels the hair on the back of his neck stand up. He can’t get caught up in the enthusiasm of exploration. He _needs_ to watch his back.

From his vantage point at the doorway, Peter takes in two details. First, from this side, the arch isn’t empty. There’s a door, and the door has a knob, which is encouraging. He rests his hand on it, ready to go right back through to Juno, to keep him company for the rest of his investigation and see about that glove.

Only, the other thing he sees is a shape in the black, playing at the edge of his vision. He directs the flashlight that way and the beam illuminates a part of what looks like a bannister. A few steps in that direction reveal that it’s not just a bannister, it’s a _stairwell,_ and it leads down.

Peter breathes out through his nose and rest his hand on his hip, glancing over his shoulder at the door.

He knows full well that a few minutes surely can, could, and _will_ hurt. He does it anyways, setting out towards the stairwell in the dark at a crisp stride. After a few steps, he plays the flashlight down again, and is pleased at what he finds. The dust on the floor is thick enough that he can follow his own footsteps backwards, a trail of breadcrumbs to lead the way home.

Perhaps if he were Juno, he’d have been a little more cautious. The truth is, Peter Nureyev is a romantic; he believes in the impossible. _His_ idea of a solid relationship is definitely sweeping someone off their feet and off into the stars. It’s a very different skillset- the difference between stealing a masterpiece and building a foundation. Luckily he loves Juno Steel very much, so he’s committed to learning, but that kind of stollidness just does not come naturally.

Otherwise, maybe he’d spare about ten more seconds to investigate instead of slipping off into the dark on silent feet, descending the stairs in a hurry.

Try the doorknob, for instance.

Or play the beam of the light around the floor a little longer, and perhaps notice the second set of footsteps in the dust.

\---

The Utopia Proxima police department has a tastefully appointed interrogation cell done in peach and cream colours. The table is glossy white. It has a vase. The vase holds an _orchid._

Juno isn’t sure if he wants to move in here or burn down the building.

Honestly, there was never a chance he was going to like Utopia Proxima. Anything the rich build themselves that they value just because the poor can’t get it, rubs him the wrong way. Be it a towering hotel or a whole town, Juno wants _out_ more than he wants in.

The thought that Peter’s probably off having the time of his life is equal parts balm and irritant. Abandoned though he may be, he likes the thought of the thief lying in a puddle of sun on the dock on that lake. It would almost be worth staying long enough to join him, if he ever gets out of this extremely serene holding cell. How can a clink smell like jasmine?

Kammourieh doesn’t keep him waiting for long. She steps back in, and Juno lifts his forehead off the table. She shuts the door behind him and leans up against it.

“Still no sign of Czar, Mister Steel?”

“If you love something, let it go. If it doesn’t come back to you chase it down later and give it a piece of your mind for abandoning you in a floral scented hell that it insisted you really _had_ to see, Juno.”

“Huh.” Says Kammourieh, and wisely decides to let that one go right by the wayside. “I still have questions about how you got involved with Galatea to begin with.”

“I told you. I wasn’t _involved_ with her. Haven’t been in years.”

“See- that’s what worries me. When you lie to me about something like that. Agent Wire vouches for you, detective, and I’d trust that woman with my life, but the fact of the matter is that Galatea DeCade was found clutching an item to her chest. Black market goods that _you_ were involved with stealing, just a few weeks ago.”

The cred drops. Juno drops his head down onto the tabletop and groans.

“This is about that atlas, isn’t it?”

 _Some little intrigue,_ his cybernetic eye.

“I used to be Dark Matters, did you know that? It’s been almost five years, but I’ve maintained my contacts over there. Marsden says you definitely took the thing. Wire says you probably took the thing for a good reason. I know the context in which you worked for DeCade, I can _guess_ that she hired you to get the book out of Dark Matters, though I frankly have no idea how. But if you can get in there, it’s feasible that you could get into my city.”

“It really, really isn’t,” says Juno, pinching the bridge of his nose, “but I know how that sounds coming from me.”

“You, I don’t believe. But Wire, I do, and Wire vouches for you. Frankly, you don’t seem like the kind of lady who’d knock off someone you cared about. Add that to the fact that it definitely wasn’t you on the tape. Which means we’re at the end of this conversation.”

Juno jumps to his feet so fast the vase rocks a little. Kammourieh gets the door.

“Does that mean my name is cleared?”

“You weren’t on the tape,” says Kammourieh, with reserve, and turns the knob, “but don’t leave town just yet, okay? And I want to talk to that assistant of yours, have him call me when he turns up.”

“Who was?”

“What?”

“Who was on the tape, if it wasn’t me?”

“Oh,” says Kammourieh, and admits, “no one. The researchers just yell at each other. There’s more crashing, and we can’t pin down the source exactly, but it seems like the only people in the room at the time of the homicide were DeCade and Eyra kpe. From the way that tape sounded, it’s just a matter of time until we find the second body.”

Juno is about to open his mouth to ask one more thing, but he’s interrupted by a burst of action from the central room of the department.

At one of the open concept desks in the pit, a woman is being interviewed. The officer dealing with her is not having a very good time and keeps making soothing noises.

“That’s Emily, the caregiver,” supplies Kammourieh, quietly. Juno blinks and looks again, and sees that yes, it definitely is. The chassis is flesh coloured, and wears a scarf wrapped around where the hair would be. The signs are very subtle, but there if you look. “We’re actually reexamining the robot breakdown theory. She’s a bit more of a glitchy than we initially realized.”

Juno is about to ask what she means.

“Don’t tell me how it sounds!” Cries the distraught android, in a crackling tone. “I’m telling you the truth! Galatea DeCade was murdered by a ghost!”


	4. The Fountain

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Peter continues to explore the world beyond the darkened door.
> 
> Juno sits down eye to cybernetic eye with Emily the caregiver.
> 
> Content warning in this chapter for quite a lot of blood.

Peter shines the flashlight down the stairwell and sucks in a breath of relief between his teeth. The steps have a bottom. Given the impossible scope of the room he’s in he’d half imagined something descending into all of eternity, but from where he’s standing he can see a landing.

He’ll just go that far, then.

He counts a hundred steps exactly, and the stairwell lets out into a sweeping… veranda, is it? There are pillars here, more glittering onyx. The floor is still tile, but it’s a little easier to see down here. Peter steps out onto the… well, it’s really like a vomitorium, isn’t it? This is a courtyard.

As his foot leaves the last step, Peter becomes aware of the sound of running water, loud in his ears, as though it’s snuck up upon him suddenly. He turns the light in that direction and can make out, yes, the sight of something splashing in the dark. A fountain? There’s less dust out here. In fact, a mild breeze picks up, and even ruffles his hair ever so slightly.

He looks up, and jolts, badly. Although they definitely should be in a basement, still well underneath the massive room above them. Instead, there are stars in the sky.

Peter Nureyev has looked up at a thousand starry skies on a thousand alien ones. He’s never seen one like this.

There’s no moon, in this impossible space, but there are a million stars in the sky above. He can’t make out the familiar swipe of a milky way or anything familiar. He’s looked at a hundred alien skies in his time, and has gotten good over the years at finding his bearings. But there’s no red pinprick that might be Mars, no sign of the dead spot around the Star-eater, that black hole near Betelgeuse. Peter frowns, spinning a slow circle as he makes his hunt for landmarks, and breathes out through his nose.

Something about the texture of the light feels just as wrong as the sound does, the same close-not-close effect. Peter shakes his head to clear it, and looks down, trying to get his bearings again as his head spins just a little. Looking at the tiles doesn’t help; down here they’re arranged in a complex mosaic that’s almost as dizzying.

Searching for something that doesn’t swim in front of his vision, Peter turns the flashlight over on the fountain again, and frowns and takes a step closer, then another.

\---

Juno hangs out across the road from the station in one of the Utopia Proxima unmanned coffee shop. A machine accepts his ID information than pours him an offensively good cup of coffee. He sits at a metal lacework table and stews.

What’s going on is an active investigation, and none of his business, and in fact, his getting tangled up any further in the case could bring suspicion right back onto him, and even foul things up such that Galatea’s killer could go unpunished.

So. Peter took a contract to provide the Aktinovolic Atlas to Galatea DeCade, but got caught up in the intrigue with Miasma and Juno himself before he could deliver on his promise. Then, when someone started trying to kill him, he’d naturally thought of DeCade first. What with her carefully cultivated reputation as a horrible harridan who’d beat two murder charges, Peter guessed she was the one responsible.

He’d stolen the atlas, with Juno’s less than brilliant help, and abandoned Juno into Sasha’s tender care, trying to make him out to be a hostage and not an accomplice. Then he’d taken the thing, photographed it from cover to cover, and found a way to smuggle it into Utopia Proxima on that three hour pass of his. Juno bets that if he combed the records for that day, he’d find a king or a prince or some other regal figure on the list of people at the entrance.

He’d dropped the book, returned to Hyperion, and they’d gotten into all that trouble in Edward Kovalyov’s auction, while Galatea had obviously used her new acquisition to cause some kind of trouble.

Juno actually remembers that Peter had said he had no idea what she was going to do with the thing when she got it. ‘Turn up dead with it clutched in her hand’ might not have been on the list of outcomes he pictured.

Just as soon as he turns back up…

But before Juno can finish the thought, Emily finally comes out of the police station. She’s still wringing her handkerchief, even though she presumably can’t cry. Juno slams the last of his exceptionally good coffee, and then runs out into the promenade.

“Emily!”

The caregiver pauses in her step, and looks up nervously at Juno, who tries to affect a little less of a barreling run towards her and more of a casual jog.

“Emily, hey, I’m- I’m sorry for your loss. I’m Juno, I’m an old friend of Galatea’s too, and I just- had some questions about what you were talking about?”

“You mean the ghost?” Asks Emily, and Juno smooths all trace of judgement off his face.

“Can I buy you a cup of coffee?”

“No.” Says Emily, of course, being made of metal and circuitboards, “But I will sit with you while you drink your coffee, Juno.”

The ghost, says Emily, has been haunting Galatea’s mansion almost since she started working there.

“It lives in the room with those terrible pieces of stone,” says Emily, “did you know she stole most of them from a temple? No wonder the place is haunted.”

Temples twig Juno’s memory, and seriously, he will tie Peter to a chair if he has to. They are going to talk until Juno extracts every detail of this.

“It was taller than you would think a ghost would be. I began to see it around the time the arches went in. Madam Galatea never knew when it was there, which was a little unsettling, believe you me. Coming in there and finding it staring down at her.” 

He wonders if all caregiver androids have this much personality, and then remembers who she worked for. He bets Galatea had an influence on either her code directly or her learned responded. The lady would never work with a punching bag, not even one who was helping her get up the stairs at night. Heck, knowing Galatea, Emily is probably the best money can buy, and specialized as it’s possible to be. Juno looks her in her wide, innocent eyes and sees one that used to be his own staring back at him- the Theia Spectrum. Nothing but top of the line cybernetics for DeCade.

He says goodbye to Emily and heads back to the hotel, heading up to the room he’s sharing with Peter and frowning at the sight of the bag right where they left it. Even the suits haven’t been hung up in the closet, which means Peter hasn’t been here in the time since they left together. Juno sits on the edge of the bed and investigates the suitcase, wondering just what Peter packed him.

It’s stuff he’s seen Juno wear in the time they’ve spent together. The blue flannel pyjama pants, the ratty old Hyperion City Racketeers team jersey. That makes one good guess at a favourite, and one ‘laundry needs doing’ emergency that he regrets Nureyev even knows he owns, but then, Juno’s the detective in the relationship.

Anyways, the fact that he was trying goes a long way to getting Juno to forgive him for the vanishing act at the crime scene earlier. Even that he can think a little bit more flexibly about, when he draws in a deep breath and gets the faintest scent of that cologne.

He’s still on the hook for the thing with the atlas, but they can hash that out when he makes it back to the hotel.

Speaking of, Juno is just reaching for his communicator to finally call him and figure out where the hell he is, when a ghost appears from nowhere right in the middle of the room and runs headlong at him with a knife.

\---

The fountain at the centre of the courtyard under the impossible stars isn’t flowing with water. It isn’t until Peter’s flashlight beam plays over the spilling pool that the scent hits him, the unmistakable raw copper with a sour chemical note of the anticoagulant it’d take to keep cold blood flowing fresh.

That’s the detail that nearly makes him retch, strangely. If it were purely nightmarish, then he’d probably be fine, but the fact that whoever built the thing had to make accommodations for the limitations of the material vis a vis the intended design brings bile rising suddenly up in his throat. He turns the flashlight off and races for the stairs by starlight alone.

No sense drawing any more attention to himself than he already has.

Peter makes it up the one hundred steps using the bannister for guidance, moving at a perfectly silent run that doesn’t slow even when the morbid water-feature is no longer audible behind him. He only turns the beam back on when he’s back in the pitch black of the upstairs level. There isn’t a speck of light up here to see by, and even though he doesn’t like it one bit, he turns the torch back on and searches the tile for his dusty footsteps, orienting himself in the direction of the gate.

Looking at the floor has the same sickening effect that it did down below. He’d chalked it up at first to a simple dizziness caused by the intricate design, but now the patterns under his feet are actively snaking and shifting. Trying to see details on top of them is a little like trying to look directly at the motes that float in your vision on a bright day, the ones that slide just as fast as you chase after them.

Eventually he thinks he gets himself pointed in the right direction, and points the beam up, hissing in relief when he sees the shadow the gate casts. Peter starts towards it, still a little too light headed to run, but keeping his step brisk and even.

He only picks up his step when the flashlight he’s holding gives a telltale flicker. It doesn’t die, but it does give a jarring little dim. Peter knows full well he charged it fully before he left Juno’s apartment this morning, but then, why should electricity behave with its’ normal properties any more than anything else has so far?

He sets himself on a direct path for the gate, just in case it dies utterly, and then does the only thing he can. He starts to run.


	5. The (other) Case

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Juno fights off an attacker with Peter's suitcase.
> 
> Peter deals with company.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay in this one! I went on a very lovely and much needed vacation. It's nice to be back :)

The knife comes down. Juno barely manages to block, lifting Peter’s valise up in between him and his attacker. The bottom of the case is apparently steel, because the blade _pings_ off it and skids away.

Of course Peter Nureyev has a suitcase that can double as useful prop in a knife fight. Juno loves that man so much his heart could stop with it, provided his attacker doesn’t manage to take care of that for him in the next ten seconds. He’s half sprawled on the bed, so kicks out hard, catching the ghost in the belly and sending it back with a surprisingly solid grunt.

He’d had the initial impression that the person was just a shadow, but when he looks close he see it’s a cultivated effect. Dark skin, smeared with some kind of deeper grime, and black clothes. The only thing that shows on the person is a silvery glint on the one hand, like they might have a cybernetic hand of their own.

“The things you’re looking into,” snarls the ghost, _“stop.”_

Juno knows that voice, that accent.

“Eyra kpe?”

Honor’s eyes go wide, and the cybernetic hand makes a flickering gesture. They vanish, right out of thin air, and Juno falls back onto the bed on his elbows.

Not dead, then. No, whatever kind of teleporter Honor is using to create the spooky effect, Juno doesn’t think ghosts sound or feel like that when you mule kick them in the stomach. He isn’t sure how it explains Emily’s assertion that the ghost was ten feet tall, but maybe Kammourieh is right, maybe the caretaker is a little glitchy.

Juno grabs his communicator and runs for the door. He’s places a call to Peter while he jogs, and when the other man doesn’t pick up, dials again for Kammourieh.

“Don’t hang up. Eyra kpe just turned up at my hotel and tried to deliver a warning about where this investigation would lead.”

“Did you detain them, Steel?”

“Couldn’t! They delivered their warning with a knife, pointy end first. I barely avoided being another body for the park rangers to pick up, and I know how precious you all can be about stains on the décor.”

Kammourieh curses, and he can hear her begin to move.

“I’m at the crime scene. The _first_ crime scene. Come meet me here. _Try_ to make it in one piece, Kammourieh.”

Juno hangs up and dials Peter, _again,_ and has a brief moment to be worried. Not that Honor succeeded in sticking a knife in the other man, that’s pretty much impossible, but rather that Peter’s found trouble and is off somewhere making all this worse.

\---

Peter arrives to the door just as light gives out entirely. He has a battery in a pocket- breast, this time, but he takes a moment to stand against the doorframe and catch his breath before reaching for it. His hands aren’t the steadiest they’ve ever been and if he drops this thing and it rolls away, he’s never going to find it again.

After a nice calming ten count, he sets about putting in the replacement. Once it’s in, he doesn’t turn the light on right away. He listens in the dark, and wishes badly that his sense of hearing extended further than it appears to in here.

Quite silently, he reaches out across the wooden door, and feels for the knob. Let him just slip out of here without needing to turn the flashlight on again, please. He’ll just head back to Galatea DeCade’s livingroom, and yes, maybe he’ll have a little bit of explaining to do when he stumbles out of the middle of thin air right on top of Juno and Kammourieh, but he can cross that bridge when he comes to it.

The knob feels icy under his hand, so intensely so that it actually burns a little. He hisses out his breath and turns…

And the door is locked.

Peter forces himself to breathe another ten count, then turns towards the door and turns the flashlight on.

There’s someone standing in front of him in the dark.

Peter has a knife up so fast it’s a miracle he doesn’t slit the person’s throat by momentum alone. He snaps out, cracks the blade out of the stranger’s hand before it even filters into his conscious mind that the stranger is armed. Then he uses the hand still holding the flashlight to throw the stranger up against the wood of the door. He pins them there like that, angling the beam so the stranger can see the blade of the knife is right at their eye.

“I’m not here to hurt you!” Gasps the stranger. 

“Yes, I too sneak up in the dark on people I don’t plan to harm with a weapon drawn. I’m certainly not about to hurt you, either.” And he makes sure the knife blade tucks in right in close against their throat.

His would-be attacker has round, terrified eyes that almost make Peter inclined to believe them. He recognizes Eyra kpe from the delivery of the atlas; this was who collected it from him at the restaurant near the border crossing.

“The knife wasn’t for you, it was for the detective! The one asking all these questions.”

“That,” says Peter, in his mildest possible voice, “is the _very_ wrong answer.”

He presses, and almost opens Honor’s jugular then and there. 

“If you kill me you won’t ever get out of here alive!”

Finally, he stills the blade.

\---

Juno jogs up the steps to the mansion this time, and Kammourieh greets him at the door.

“Start from the beginning,” she orders him, letting him through into the hall, and makes Juno go through the whole story two times. He goes over the conversation with Emily, the trip back to his hotel. Hell, he even tells her the abridged version of being tricked into stealing the atlas for Rex Glass, the man escaping off into the night with it and bringing it here. No need for her to connect that name with Zachary Czar, after all. And speaking of which;

“I still haven’t found my partner. I don’t know if that means anything, but it makes me want to have a look around here. He may be the independent type but this is a little much, even for him.”

It’s nighttime outside, which means it’s been hours since he had any word from Peter. 

“Well, last we saw him, wasn’t he stepping out to search the rest of this place? We can begin there. He seemed like kind of a geek for this stuff, maybe he tripped into the library and hasn’t climbed his way back out yet.”

Which Juno’s got to admit, is a pretty good cold read on Peter Nureyev, but he still won’t feel entirely settled until he sees the thief with all his bits and pieces intact, attached, and unpunctured.

He’s never been to Galatea’s house before, obviously, but walking through it brings back memories of the woman. The front hall has two large portraits, both of the victims of the homicides she went to trial for. Juno rolls his eyes so hard the thea gives a little twinge, and tries the next door. Then the next.

“I thought he was an assistant?” Asks Kammourieh, behind him, while Juno steps into a room with a thick carpet and a series of shelves on the walls.

“Sorry?”

“Czar. You introduced him as your assistant.”

“He is. But we’re also partners.” He glances over his shoulder at her, away from the shelves full of weird relics, “you know, like boyfriends, but when you’re at an age where you can’t say ‘boyfriend’ without sounding like you’re having a midlife crisis and trying desperately to hang on to your vanishing youth.”

“And how does that go? Working so closely with someone who you’re partners with?”

“Well. We don’t collaborate on every case. Just when I could use a little extra help.”

“Or when the murder happens to take place in Utopia Proxima?”

“Am I going to arrested for some kind of visa violation if I say yes?”

“Depends how much you annoy me while we continue to investigate, doesn’t it? I’m still not sure how it is I feel about one of my initial suspects involving themselves so much in the case. You’re a pretty persistent lady, Mister Steel.” 

“You almost manage to make it sound like a compliment.”

“It almost is one.” Kammourieh smirks, and steps behind the desk at the centre of the room, bending down with a soft ‘huh,’ at an unexpected discovery.

“More electronics behind stationary objects, detective. Agent Wire was right, you do have your uses.”

“That’s not Galatea’s.” Says Juno, blood running cold. “That’s- I think that’s Zachary’s camera.”

Frowning, the other woman presses the power button, and cues up the gallery. The very first photo is one of Juno, smiling, with a backdrop of riotous green. He hadn’t even noticed him taking the picture.

“We’ve got a serious problem.”

\---

“I’ll use the door,” says Peter, quietly.

“You can’t,” answers Honor, hands trembling, leaning back into the wood.

“I’ll kill you, take the glove off your body, and use it, instead.”

This gives the researcher a moment’s more pause, but in the end, they answer;

“You could. But then you wouldn’t know what we learned about the people who built this place.”

They have a point, there. Peter frowns, and lowers the knife a hair, then curses when the flashlight flickers. That was much faster than the last one, and that battery had been completely full.

He turns the light off, but keeps a hand on Eyra kpe.

“Well, at least we’ll be a little more discrete this way.” Even if it does feel strange to stand in the pitch black, bodily up against a stranger, whose pulse he can feel slamming in their throat.

“Don’t be stupid,” answers his would-be-attacker, now captive, “you don’t build a world without light unless you can see in the dark.”


	6. The Guardian

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Peter and Juno are reunited.
> 
> They all meet the creature that lives beyond the door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CONTENT WARNING. Gore. Violence. Gory violence.

Juno picks flicks through the camera roll and smiles when he sees what Peter was in here doing. Of course the man couldn’t resist a detailed exploration of everything DeCade had to offer.

“He knows something about all this stuff,” hypothesizes Kammourieh, coming to follow along over Juno’s shoulder as he seeks out the item corresponding to the first picture, “maybe something in here provoked- well, this is a hell of a reaction.”

“Maybe,” agrees Juno, as he finds the tablet, the calliope, skips the framed photo of a group of researchers, heads left to the little machine that looks like it could be used for some kind of fine drilling, “but tell me something. What exactly did your techs hear on that audio device?”

“Just what you did. The voices, and then a sudden bunch of static. They were able to clear up the interference, which they said was some kind of massive electromagnetic pulse, but underneath it all was inarticulate. Just screaming, and, uh. Crashing. The sounds of a fight with someone with a bone to pick.”

“You ruled me out based on- what, my slightness of stature?” the pictures lead him to and past a sealed wooden box, a set of something that look like tuning calipers. At last, the trail dead ends on a last photo of a book.

“You couldn’t have scared them like the thing on the tape scared them. No way, no how. No mask, no suit, no nothing.”

He frowns, from the screen to book on the shelf Peter had photographed. Could this thing have got him into some kind of trouble? But no, there’s a fine layer of dust on the thing hasn’t been disturbed.

Past that, however, is something Juno recognizes. Something Peter had been too interested in to take a picture of. The glove is made of metal and has a peculiar sheen to it that he’s seen before once already today.

“Honor Eyra kpe doesn’t have a cybernetic hand, do they?”

“Not as far as I know. And I would know.”

“Okay then.” He turns off the camera and sets it down, as the very last piece clicks into place. “Time to do a little ghost hunting.”

“How, exactly, do you think you’re going to be able to hunt for something that doesn’t exist?”

“That’s simple.” Says Juno, leading the way back towards the main room, with the door. “What do professional ethics, private property, and the promising future all have in common?”

“What’s that, Steel?”

“Whether or not you see them is all a matter of perspective. Me and Emily, we’ve got a way of looking at the world in common.”

\---

Peter listens to Honor gasp for breath in the dark and runs through everything he’s been told so far.

“So if your glove travels with you, why did I end up here without the other one?”

“Because you don’t know what you’re doing, and because it was set aside as defective,” says Honor, acerbically, and Peter supposes he deserved that.

“And I suppose you’re not capable of bringing me back there with you?”

“No, I’m afraid not. If you go, it’ll have to be through the door.”

“I thought you said the door wasn’t working?”

“It isn’t currently,” explains Eyra kpe, “but only because I deactivated it on that side.”

“And would you care to explain why it is you’d build something like this and then deactivate it?”

And so, Eyra kpe explains.

“We didn’t know what we were doing. Sure, Galatea was an expert on aktinovolik research, and yes, her theory that the fissures all connected to a subreality was technically correct, but we had no idea about… any of the rest of it. The terror we would find when we opened the door.

“We got through here, and we found this place. And this isn’t some manifestation of an alternate plain that our minds are trying to grasp, thief. Or if it is, then there’s a separate creation in here that we choose to interpret as being an entity. A local race. A local race who are territorial.”

“And who do not, I imagine, appreciate having a new door suddenly smashed through their livingroom wall,” realizes Peter. “Back on Mars they’re busily blaming you for Galatea’s murder by now, but that wasn’t it at all, was it?”

“We opened the door and something killed her. Her hand was still on the knob. I shut the machine down and whisked out of there using the glove, and I think the time difference was enough for me to slip away, but it’s been following me ever since. I pop back to Mars whenever I need to warn someone not to reopen the doorway- I can _see_ over there, I’ve been watching them investigate her rooms, watching that detective you look poke around looking for what Emily is calling the ghost. If he opens that door back up, then he’s going to bring more of those things down on the world, and we can’t let that happen.”

“Wait,” says Peter, holding up a hand, a gesture quite lost in the dark on the little scientist, “what are you talking about, the time difference?”

“Oh. Of course. Time passes at very different speeds, here and there. You’ve been over here- how long now, subjectively, would you say?”

“Six, maybe seven minutes? Fifteen at the outside.”

“Yeah, it’s midnight on Mars. Maybe even morning, since we started speaking to each other. The ratio isn’t always exactly consistent.”

Peter sucks in a surprised, regretful breath between his teeth, and resolves;

“Then we need to solve this problem right now. Go back over there and open the door, I’ll duck through quickly and you can dash away immediately and leave us to deal with the consequences.”

“No,” says Eyra kpe, “it’s not that simple.”

And Peter is just opening his mouth to argue, when he hears something that makes him stop. Something crashes, out in the dark, something deep and echoing.

Honor whimpers, and grabs his arm, and he lifts his knife up in a defensive posture, listening as closely as he can to the black.

\---

“What is this?”

Says Juno, standing in the doorway to the room with, well, the room with the doorway. His cybernetic eye is on a ultraviolet spectrum.

Peter Nureyev, or at least a statue shaped like him, is standing in the room. The door is closed now, and he’s got his back against it, with his hand outstretched in front of Honor Eyra kpe. His stance is somehow protective. He’s got a knife up, just about at throat level, and he looks as wary as Juno has ever seen him.

He is absolutely still, not even breathing. If Juno watches the very tip of the knife he swears he can see it lifting up, but so slowly it’s almost imperceptible, even though Peter Nureyev fairly vibrates with energy. 

Juno turns his head in the direction his boyfriend is staring, and then gulps at what he sees. Emerging, half from the wall, is something _huge._ It’s definitely the ghost Emily was talking about.

The thing is made of spines. Metal on metal on metal, with glinting eyes and a faceplate that alludes to a crooked, jagged mouth, teeth all pointing _inwards,_ forming a spiny circle. It moves, slow still, but at a rate Juno can see. Like pouring molasses. It is running. It is running right at Peter.

He’s never seen anything so shocking and terrible happen in _such_ slow motion. Juno leaps forward and runs for the door, grabbing through the translucent nothingness of whatever’s happening in this other spectrum, and misstepping, smack, right into the solid oak of the _actual_ door. He grabs his face, as the impact rattles the cybernetic eye so badly the spectrum cuts out for a second.

In the real world the door is open. Okay, maybe he can start there. Juno slams it shut, staying on the side Peter _isn’t_ on. He doesn’t have time to answer Kammourieh, he doesn’t have time to check that the ghost is still running at him.

The spectrum reengages, and Juno turns his attention to what he’d thought was a weird locking mechanism. It’s a series of symbols, not numbers, and when he stares at it with both eyes his head throbs- the images aren’t lining up.

On a hunch alone, Juno begins to scramble, spinning and turning bits until one by one, the reality reflects the spectrum version, until the machine is in synch with both versions of itself.

In the other side of time and space, Peter finishes bringing his knife up, bracing himself for the sound of a collapsing junkyard worth of metal bearing down on them. Honor, useless, _screams_ and he wants to tell them to shut up because he needs to hear this to stand a chance.

Honor screams so loudly he misses the click of the lock behind them, but there’s no mistaking the flood of light as the door swings open, or the strong arms that grab him and _heave_ him backwards. Peter staggers into the low light of Galatea DeCade’s study, and Honor Eyra kpe is dragged right along with him.

Peter kicks the door shut, and trips backwards onto the carpet, nearly stabbing someone by accident as he ends up in a shocked tangle on the floor.

Juno, strangely prescient creature that he is, has leapt sideways and peered around the door, looking right through space at where the sound in the dark was coming from. Eyra kpe is on their knees, and retching onto the very expensive carpet. Peter’s own head is spinning very badly, which makes him wonder if it’s some effect of going back and forth through the door…

“It’s still coming,” says Juno, sharply, “it isn’t slowing down, _Kammourieh,_ get your blaster out right now right _now!”_

And then it’s through.

The thing is even more frightening in the real world, Juno thinks. The spines are rusty, maybe bloody. The talons are articulate and terrible. Blaster shots deflect right of it; Kammourieh unloads at its’ chest, and it doesn’t even appear to notice.

Juno tries for the eyes. It doesn’t even _blink._

It whistles past him on a breeze. Peter is fast, but this thing can barely be seen in the real world, which is how come Juno was able to see it shifting lazily in the other world while Peter seemed to be fully frozen. One second it’s across the room, then it’s past Juno and on top of Honor, who lets out a pitiful scream.

The monster bends, and there’s a terrible sound, a surgical sound, and Juno guesses Eyra kpe is going to need that cybernetic hand after all. They howl.

Peter, damn him, has his knife up and has scrambled to a crouch. He looks as pale as Juno has ever seen him, and terrible cornered, and is the next closest person to the menace. Honor screams a second time, as his attacker straightens up and turns away, and towards Peter which, look- isn’t going to work.

“Hey! Hey, rustbucket!” Screams Juno, and throws his blaster- it pings right off the head (helmet?) and the monster turns away from Nureyev and to face him, with its’ terrible clicking teeth and vile, wet eyes. 

“Yeah you,” says Juno, with absolutely no hope of coming up with anything remotely intelligent for what to say next.

Peter Nureyev’s quick thinking saves his life. He grabs the blaster off the carpet where it’s fallen, and springs for the door, an elegant movement that draws the alien’s gaze back down to him. That’s exactly what Juno doesn’t want to have happen, but Peter has a plan.

He looks up into that terrible face, points the blaster at the door, right at the lock, and then fires, six times in quick succession, until the mechanism Juno engaged is smoking, charred, and spitting sparks. Juno hadn’t even known there were wires in there.

Peter flips the gun around, handling it by the barrel, and then offers it up. He’s a tall man, but he has to lift his hand towards the terror, which stands far above even him. Juno wants to scream at him to get his hands away from that thing. Juno’s heart skips a beat. 

It’s so close he can see the glittery lights of its’ eyes reflecting in Peter’s glasses. The serenity, the soft _curiosity_ in Peter's expression is the only thing that keeps Juno from screaming.

The monster takes the gun neatly out of Peter’s outstretched hand, then shifts it’s step sideways. It brings a foot down on the hand, on the glove specifically, and lowers its’ foot. Something like ten tons of metal turns the delicate machine and the flesh inside it into pulp.

It vanishes. It's as though space itself breathes out.

Peter crumples, legs buckling, and Juno is right there to help him to the ground, arms folding tight around him in relief.


	7. The End

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Epilogue

The bad news is, Peter needs to be taken straight to the hospital. So does Juno, though the damage is much more minor in his case. It turns out that the radiation in Moratuwa is a property of all access points to the other world, and bad inside there too. Juno had been exposed, lunging through the doorway to heave Peter and Honor out. Peter took a much heavier dose, the fifteen minutes or so he was on the other side.

Honor is worse still, of course, having had a much longer exposure, plus the significant bloodloss due to the loss of the hand. Kammourieh’s quick thinking and quicker tourniquet saved their life, but things are going to be touch and go for a little while where the radiation damage is concerned.

The good news is, Kammourieh gets in touch and lets them know that the DeCade case is closed and Juno is officially no longer a suspect. Also, that she agrees that Czar shouldn’t travel when he’s in this state and extends their Proxima visas by another week. The hotel is happy to accommodate, and by the second night, Peter is allowed to leave the hospital, as long as he returns the next morning for a check up, and every day until the doctors give him the all clear. Proxima physicians are of the belief that a good night’s rest in your own bed is the best medicine.

It may not be their own bed, but the hotel one is pretty restful. Also no one tries to kill them and with Peter’s Bimbillan disruption device active, absolutely zero people can watch them sleep, which Juno feels pretty good about. Also restful, by the way doctor, is napping in a hammock by the side of a lake, or on deck chairs up on a luxurious balcony. 

Juno doesn’t even have time to get miserable or stir crazy, he’s so busy staring at Peter like he’s about to vanish into another dimension.

Peter gets to see everything he wanted to see, albeit at a gentle amble and leaning heavily on Juno after particularly strenuous walks. Juno gets to see Peter Nureyev see everything he wanted to see, which is its’ own special kind of hedonism. Loving someone means being able to borrow dreams.

“Why didn’t you tell me Galatea DeCade was the person you sold the Atlas to?” Juno finally asks, much later, on their very last night in Utopia. Peter looks up from his book, and adjusts his glasses, contemplating the question a moment before he answers.

“I suppose part of me was still embarrassed about what happened. Overreacting to her reputation, assuming she was the cause of all the trouble when it was really Kovalyov to blame for it all. And then to find out on top of all that, that you _knew_ her, that you obviously considered the woman some kind of friend?”

Juno comes closer in the bed, curling up with his head on Peter’s chest, arm tucking around his waist. It’s sometimes a little easier to talk when he doesn’t have to look him right in the eye.

“I’m sorry, Juno,” says Peter, quietly, “I should have told you. It’s just not something I’m particularly eager to rehash just yet.”

“I get there being stuff about your brother you don’t want to get into,” promises Juno, and then corrects himself, “adoptive brother. I’m not mad. But I do need you to tell me, are you going to keep looking into this stuff? This research you’re so obsessed with.”

“Mm.” Says Peter, quietly. “I’d be a fool to, wouldn’t I? After what happened to DeCade, and now Eyra kpe. How do you think I’d look, with a cybernetic hand?”

Juno snorts, and closes his eyes, waiting the deflection out. He’s learned his lesson about the things Peter allows his non-answers to imply. Eventually Peter reaches to stroke a hand down his back and admits;

“I will keep looking. But I do promise I will not do what they did. I will be very, very careful.”

This isn’t exactly what Juno wants to hear, but it is a start.

As nice as the latter part of the trip has been, Juno is more than a little relieved to see the Utopia dome disappearing in his rearview camera as they hit the road back towards Hyperion. Peter drowses in the passengers’ seat, head swaying gently as they rise and fall over hill and dune.

“What is it about all this that gets you?” He wonders, not sure he’ll get an answer, but ready to ask.

“It’s the sense of possibility,” answers Peter, anyways, blurry and honest in his current state, “I meant what I said. About knowledge that hasn’t been filtered through authority. The systems of power are so entrenched, Juno. This could be something new. Something entirely out of the hands of authorities of any world. Something anarchic, something that could change the existing economies around travel, or energy.

“I’m not really a thief any more. I’ve got all the money I could ever possibly spend and I’ve proven everything there is to prove. But there are still ideas out there to steal. And what is a thief, anyways, except an agent of chaos? I’ve spent all this time disrupting who thinks they own what. Now I’ll just be- shaking up a different outfit.”

“Peter Nureyev, perpetually upending the lives of everyone he comes in contact with,” says Juno, referring to himself most of all, “and now the fabric of the universe itself.”

Peter smiles, slow and intimate, still with his eyes closed. His lashes cast shadows on his cheekbones, glasses temporarily folded in his lap while he rests. Juno can see the tiny indentations on the bridge of his nose. The sweep of rouge on his cheekbone that he’s wearing now that he feels a little better.

“Don’t die on me, Nureyev,” Juno instructs, sharp and serious, abrupt enough that the other man opens his eyes and glances over at him, “I mean it. I saw your face, looking up at that thing. I know I'm being a terrible hypocrite, but please. Please let this be the kick in the teeth that reactivates your self-preservation instinct.”

It definitely hasn’t, by the wry tilt to that smile. Peter puts his glasses back on and reaches to rest his hand on Juno’s thigh. They crest a hill into the Martian sunset.


End file.
